A state appellate court on Thursday agreed with Pennsylvania GOP Senatorial candidate David McCormick and ordered Pennsylvania counties to tally more than 800 undated mail ballots and include them in the vote totals they report for the neck-and-neck Republican primary race between McCormick and Mehmet Oz.In a 40-page opinion, Renee Cohn Jubelirer, president judge of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, described the state's practice of rejecting ballots that arrived without a required handwritten date from the voter on the outer envelope as a potentially unfair restriction of the right to vote.
In a nod to the temporary status of her order, she instructed counties to submit two sets of election results to the state: one with the undated ballots included and one without.
Another said he didn't want to reject the undated ballots - he just didn't think the law allowed him to count them unless a court told him to do so.
In arguing undated ballots should be counted, lawyers for McCormick's campaign maintained at a hearing Tuesday that the state's requirement that envelopes be dated by the voter for them to count was arbitrary and served no purpose - both in theory and in practice.
McCormick lawyer Ronald L. Hicks Jr. noted, some counties were counting ballots with the wrong date - such as the voter's date of birth - and only rejecting those that had no date at all.
Elections officials have estimated there are slightly more than 800 undated Republican mail ballots statewide.
While McCormick has done better than Oz with votes cast by mail, the mail ballots counted to date suggest he could receive just a few dozen additional votes if all undated ballots are counted.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/oz-mccormick-pa-senate-race-undated-mail-ballots-ruling-20220602.html
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